Cordwainer Forms Migration — WP Forms to Gravity Forms

Overview

During a February 2026 internal sync, Mark flagged the Cordwainer site as a "cluster" inherited from a previous developer — a mix of mismatched plugins, duplicate tag manager accounts, and non-standard tooling. The highest-priority remediation item is replacing all WP Forms instances with Gravity Forms, which is the agency's standard form plugin.

This task was assigned to Eshok and is to be completed promptly.

Background

The Cordwainer site was not built from scratch by the agency — it was adopted from a prior developer's setup. This left a patchwork of plugins and configurations that have caused ongoing instability. Mark has been working through a broader cleanup, including:

Replacing the SEO tool
Optimizing and compressing images (Smush)
Adding alt text to approximately 800 images
Removing redundant or conflicting plugins

Despite this progress, WP Forms remains on the site and represents the most significant outstanding risk to form reliability and site stability.

Decision

Replace all WP Forms instances with Gravity Forms and remove WP Forms from the site entirely.

Rationale:
- Gravity Forms is the agency's standard; it is more stable and better supported within the team's workflow
- WP Forms was introduced by the previous developer and is inconsistent with the agency's stack
- Standardizing on Gravity Forms reduces future maintenance overhead and support risk

"We're using WP Forms. Well, the first thing I think we need to do like now is we need to get Jeff or whatever developers available and we need to convert all these forms to Gravity Forms and get these WP Forms out of here." — Mark Hope

Scope

Audit all forms currently live on the Cordwainer site
Rebuild each form in Gravity Forms, preserving field structure and submission behavior
Verify form functionality post-migration (submissions, notifications, integrations)
Remove WP Forms plugin once all forms are confirmed working

The number of forms is estimated at three to four.

Action Items

[ ] Eshok — Audit all existing WP Forms on Cordwainer, rebuild in Gravity Forms, verify, and remove WP Forms plugin
[ ] Sebastian — Task Eshok with this migration; confirm completion before closing Cordwainer site work

^[1] — Cordwainer client overview
^[2] — Source meeting where this priority was identified
^[3] — Parallel rebuild task for New Dawn (same Eshok assignment queue)